History Focus for August 10

A short focus on a person or event associated with this day in History.

Herbert Clark Hoover-

Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. He was the first United States president to be born west of the Mississippi River. His parents and most of his close relatives were rural Quakers, an influence that was decisive and lifelong. His parents, Jesse Hoover, a blacksmith and farm implement dealer, and Huldah Minthorn Hoover, died before he was ten years of age. He and his brother and sister were welcomed into the homes of relatives.

 

He entered Stanford University with that institution's first freshman class. There Hoover studied geology and mining. He worked his way through college by operating a newspaper route and a laundry agency, and doing clerical work in the department of geology. He managed to find time to play on the freshman baseball nine and to help organize student activities. He worked on geological surveys in the summer. It was also there that he met Lou Henry. She was the only woman geology major attending Stanford at the time. Later, in 1897, she was to become his wife.

 

When Hoover graduated in 1895, engineering jobs were scarce. He found work pushing a car in a gold mine. For this he received $2.00 a day for a ten-hour night shift seven days a week. He next got work in an engineer's office by offering to do typing. Once hired, he proved his ability on jobs in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. He received his first great chance before he was 24, when his employer recommended him to a British engineering firm. He introduced American mining methods in the hot, dry Coolgardie gold fields of Western Australia for them. One mine whose purchase he recommended produced 55 million dollars in gold during the next 50 years. Managing and reorganizing mining properties in Western Australia and China and elsewhere, Hoover was a millionaire by the time he was 40 years old. Hoover was the first president to be a millionaire before taking the office of the presidency.

 

When Hoover was offered a job in China he immediately proposed marriage to Lou Henry. They sailed for China on their wedding day, Feb. 10, 1899. In Asia Hoover's exploring journeys took him into Manchuria and Mongolia. While in China he and Mrs. Hoover endured the siege of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. They were among the 200 foreigners who were besieged in Tientsin (now Tianjin) for a month. Hoover helped strengthen fortifications and procure food and pure water. His wife served as a volunteer nurse. While in China he and his wife learned to speak Chinese. After Hoover became president he and his wife would often speak in Chinese when they did not wish for White House guests or staff to know what they were saying.

 

The great depression was unfortunate for all .It was, however, especially politically unfortunate for Hoover. Hoover enjoyed only a half year of the economic prosperity with which the country had become familiar during the 1920s. He then had to deal with the depression. He urged the states to create jobs through public works. He encouraged drives by local community chests and other charities. He took the position that direct aid to the unemployed was the duty of the localities and of private charities. Federal relief, he felt, would be subject to political control and graft, while a direct dole would weaken individual initiative. His plan would have and did work, but time and politics was not on his side. Hoover's Democratic opponents had fashioned an image of him as a reactionary unwilling to do anything to help people in distress. Unfair though it was, in light of Hoover's previous record, this stereotype haunted him, and his party, for the rest of his life, even though his opponents, when they came to power in 1933, wrestled with the same intractable problems until wartime production and employment came to their rescue.

 

The depression continued to deepen as the election campaign of 1932 got under way. Nominated for reelection in 1932, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wrote and spoke against Roosevelt's New Deal, but little attention was paid to him.

 

As an elder statesman, Hoover was quite busy. In 1940 he offered a plan for food distribution in occupied countries. In 1946, as honorary chairman of the Famine Emergency Committee, he flew to Europe, Asia, and South America to survey food needs and supplies. In 1948 President Truman appointed him to recommend changes that would make federal agencies more efficient and economical. His money-saving changes included the creation of the General Services Administration to centralize buying and distribution of government supplies. Hoover served as elder statesman and adviser to the Eisenhower Administration and headed a new economy commission. Today, we see his economic policies were quite sound. The Federal New Deal policies that were instituted had quick positive effect, but their long-lasting effect was to create the huge National deficit we are saddled with today. Hoover died in New York City on Oct. 20, 1964, at the age of 90. He was buried near his birthplace in West Branch.

 

Sources: White House Tales | Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia

© Phillip Bower